The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  All the family members had been asked to write statements. Antonello and Paolina wrote a joint one, in the end. The pain of losing Ashleigh was impossible to articulate. Numb. Sad. Devastated. All the words they wrote down were inadequate. A gaping hole, Paolina said. Emptiness. The loss of laughter, of the possibility of laughter. The loss of hunger, of sleep. Shivering even on warm days. Deprived of energy. No energy for the garden, the house. Plants dying from lack of water. Surfaces covered in dust. And the ache, worse than any cancer pain. The rush every time he caught sight of a young woman in the distance who might, who could be, who looked like Ashleigh, and having to stop himself from following. Paolina’s refusal to do more tests. Her refusal to go back to the doctor. Antonello’s inability to convince her. The loss of hope. No solace anywhere. Spending hours at the base of the bridge. Memories of the men falling returning in dreams again and again and again. Fury. Anger. And nowhere to direct it.

  ‘They want statements to justify putting Jo away for a long, long time,’ Paolina had said as they sat in their kitchen with their scribbled notes. ‘If we say how we feel about losing Ashleigh, Jo will go to prison for a lifetime. I can’t do that. Prisons are terrible places, and she’s only young.’

  ‘We have to write something,’ Antonello said. ‘We have to — otherwise it’s like we’re not affected.’

  ‘Nello, that’s not true.’

  ‘The court case is a public acknowledgement of the terrible loss of Ashleigh. That she was important. Important to a lot of people. To us.’

  ‘But it was an accident and Jo’s already being punished. She won’t recover.’

  ‘I know it was an accident and she didn’t mean to hurt Ashleigh. I know it was bad luck. I know Ashleigh shouldn’t have got in the car. But Jo needs to be punished by the law. I want the law, the community, to say it was wrong,’ Antonello said.

  ‘But we don’t need to make it any harder for her than it has to be. You said yourself that you felt sorry for her,’ Paolina said.

  ‘You’re right, she’s suffering too.’

  They had talked about it for a long time, and in the end they agreed to write a short statement about their granddaughter, about her beauty and her potential, her intelligence, the joy she brought to their lives, and about their sadness and grief at losing her.

  On the way from the carpark to the courtroom that morning, Alex had said, ‘I hope she gets a long sentence. I know I should be more forgiving. That I should be moving on, and that I should think about what Ashleigh might’ve wanted. I’m trying not to hate her, but she must be punished … and after this fucking court case, I don’t want to see her again, never. I want her to be banished. I don’t want to walk around dreading that I might run into her or that Jane or Rae might run into her.’

  Despite Alex’s lingering anger, he and Rae were coming back to themselves, slowly. They were back to parenting Jane, and they were talking to each other again, occasionally touching, winking at each other when something Antonello or Paolina said seemed old-fashioned or tiresome or repetitive.

  In the few months between his meeting with Jo at the bridge and the court case, Antonello had made several attempts to get closer to his son and daughter. This wasn’t easy. There was no going back to the man he’d been before the bridge collapsed, young and naïve, a man who loved easily. Nicki didn’t trust his approaches, but she let him make them, and he was grateful for that. Alex was more forgiving, more receptive. Together, father and son replanted the vegetable garden in Alex and Rae’s backyard and, with Rae’s blessing, a magnolia where the rose garden had been.

  They spent hours in the garden, Paolina sitting on a chair in the shade, dozing and waking and dozing again, and Antonello and Alex digging and planting, getting hot and sweaty. At first, they only talked about the soil and the plants, the direction of the sun, or the kind of fertiliser they should use. Antonello’s muscles ached at the end of those days, and his knees creaked and he made jokes about the joints needing oiling. In the evenings, he lay in a hot bath wondering if he had the strength to lift himself up, but the next day he went back again.

  A couple of days before the court case, Alex confessed to Antonello that he’d sent text messages to Jo after the accident.

  They’d been planting a row of olive trees along the back fence-line. It was a particularly warm day and, exhausted, they’d stopped to have a rest. Antonello was leaning on his shovel for support.

  ‘I had Ashleigh’s phone. She had a photograph on it, of her and Jo all dressed up — it was taken that night, before they went to the party. She was so beautiful … I was so angry, Dad. I wanted Jo to hurt. I wanted her to be dead. So I sent her messages. I called her a murderer and a killer and said I wished she was dead.’

  ‘Alex,’ Antonello said. ‘When?’

  ‘That day, that awful day, and then on the day of the funeral.’

  It was not in Alex’s nature to be cruel. As children, when Alex and Nicki fought, Nicki was the one who threw punches, who broke toys. Alex caved early, apologised, made amends.

  ‘It’s a shameful thing for an adult man to do,’ Alex continued. ‘I know that. I was so angry. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted her to feel like shit. I wanted her to feel so bad that she’d want to die. I remember thinking, I hope this makes her want to kill herself. I wanted to drive her to kill herself so her mother could feel the pain I was feeling.’

  ‘Grief can drive us crazy, Alex. Makes us do crazy things.’

  ‘I wanted to drive a young woman to suicide; people get locked up for doing stuff like that. If Ashleigh was alive, she’d be ashamed of me. If Mum knew, she’d be ashamed of me. Aren’t you ashamed of me?’

  ‘No, Alex. No, I’m not. And Ashleigh would understand. She’d forgive you. And so would your mother.’

  ‘Please don’t tell Mum.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Antonello tossed his shovel onto the ground and put his arms around his son. ‘You are a good man, Alex. A terrible thing happened to you, and it’s hard.’

  ‘I loved Ashleigh so much,’ Alex said, letting himself lean into his father’s embrace. ‘When she died, I wanted to destroy everything — not just Jo but everything, myself included.’

  As they moved apart again, Antonello said, ‘I understand, Alex, better than you think. When the bridge collapsed, I thought about blowing it up. I wanted to obliterate it. And when I realised I couldn’t do that, I thought about suicide.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ever tell us about the bridge?’

  ‘The guilt, the grief, the anger … I’m not going to promise you it gets better, but I can tell you that some things make it worse, so please don’t do what I did. Don’t shut down. Don’t hold on to the anger. If you do, you won’t be able to give Jane and Rae the love they deserve. If you shut down, everything will get worse.’

  ‘I’m starting to see that,’ Alex said. ‘But when people say move on, it seems so cruel. Move on and leave Ashleigh behind — how can we do that?’

  ‘No one wants you to leave Ashleigh behind, but there are ways to move on. When I look at my friend Sam, I see that he moved on, but he took the bridge collapse with him and he used it to make things better for workers in the future. I am not suggesting you need to get involved with the road accident campaigns or anything like that. But you need to go back to work, go back to being a father and a husband and a part of the community.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alex said. ‘I’ve been thinking about going back to work. It’s time.’

  Jo sat at the back of the courtroom and waited. Sarah, in her fancy black cloak and wig, was barely recognisable. It covered her large frame like a superhero cape, but Jo didn’t expect any superhuman feats; she didn’t expect to be rescued from the inevitable. Jo’s new suit, bought under Sarah’s direction, hung on her loosely. A skirt and a jacket like you might wear to an interview for an office job. But she wasn’t going for a job, she was waiting to be sente
nced. Waiting to hear what the judge was going to say. Waiting, and trying not to look at Ash’s family. Not to look at Mani and Laura. Or Kevin. Or at Mary and Mandy. Looking down at her feet, at her mother’s plain blue shoes, tight around the toes.

  Her father had rung the night before. ‘It’s too hard for me to get away.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Mandy said, but Jo didn’t care. ‘I never see him anyway. I don’t need him to come.’

  She prayed the judge would arrive quickly, that she would be sent away for a long time, that they’d take her straight from the courtroom out some back door to the prison and lock her away.

  Everyone stood when the judge arrived. She came in through a side door, took her seat, and nodded, and everyone sat back down again. Antonello had a strong desire to ask them all to stop. Wait! he wanted to scream, Stop. She’s been punished enough. Let her live her life. But instead he sat still, his hand over Paolina’s, from which the rosary hung like teardrops. All of them acting out their parts.

  The victim impact statements, read by the prosecutor, were relentless. ‘The house is so dark,’ he began, reading Jane’s statement out in his deep, old-man voice while Jane sat in her seat crying. ‘It feels like there is never going to be any light again. I’m sad all the time. I don’t think the sadness is ever going to go away. No one laughs anymore. Ashleigh used to laugh all the time. The day Ashleigh died, I was angry with her. She promised to take me shopping but she was home late and then went back out. I told her I hated her. I don’t hate her, and now she’s dead. But I’m angry at her because she got into that car with Jo when they were drunk. And I’m angry with Jo because she drove while she was drunk. She was my friend too and now I have to hate her. The counsellor keeps asking me to write letters, paint pictures, do all this crap so I can stop being angry, but I don’t want to.’

  At the end of Jane’s statement, the courtroom was filled with the sound of weeping. The prosecutor read Rae and Alex’s statement, and a statement from Mani and Laura; there were still statements from Antonello and Paolina, Rae’s parents, and Kevin, but the judge said, ‘I think I’ll read the rest in my chamber. I don’t think we should read them all out aloud.’

  Antonello thought Rae and Alex might object, but later, during the lunch break, when they all sat in a café around the corner from the courthouse, Rae said she was relieved too. She was so exhausted, emotionally exhausted.

  Rae hadn’t spoken all day. In the courtroom, she sat gripping the sides of the seat. She fidgeted in the chair, and whenever they were sent out of the room, she paced the hallway. At lunch, she took a couple of bites of the sandwich on her plate and then shoved it aside. As she walked back, she said to Antonello, ‘It will be over soon. This is the last thing. We’ve been waiting for this as if it meant something, and now I see her … I thought I wouldn’t want to look at her but I can’t help it. She’s a scared kid. I see her and I see Ashleigh, I see them together, and I see she’s lost too. And now I can’t feel what I should feel, I can’t … Now I think I should do something to stop her going to prison, even though I know she should go, she should go … But I can see Ashleigh … It could’ve been the other way around, thick as thieves they were, and how many nights I cooked them dinner, helped them with their homework, and I was happy to see them together, glad my daughter had a friend and they were so close …’ She stopped to catch her breath. ‘I can’t say this to Alex.’

  ‘I think you can,’ Antonello said.

  ‘No. No, anyway the law will do what it has to do. It’s how it has to be.’

  Chapter 28

  Sarah listened carefully to the prosecutor’s closing remarks. She and Robert had been in court together before, and they knew each other’s styles. There was nothing surprising — the victim impact statements had been difficult to sit through, and there wasn’t much more he needed to add. Jo was a probationary driver; she should not have been drinking at all. But, not only had she been drinking, she was drunk, too drunk to drive in any circumstances. The other girls asked her if she was okay to drive and she said yes. She drove them, even though she knew that according to her licence conditions she was only allowed one passenger under 22 years of age. She was angry and arguing with Ashleigh as she drove. He accepted that she was remorseful. Noted it was her first offence, that she was pleading guilty, but that this shouldn’t and didn’t change the facts of the case.

  ‘As a parent, I look across at Ashleigh Bassillo-White’s family, at her sister, her mother, and her father, at her grandparents, and at her friends. I see their loss and their grief and it’s heartbreaking. If Joanne Neilson had done the right thing, what she knew to be the right thing, Ashleigh would be alive. She would’ve finished her VCE and be at university on her way to becoming a lawyer, her cherished dream. Ashleigh’s family would be going about their lives. But their family has been torn apart and they are devastated. Joanne Neilson’s responsible for that.

  ‘Should the court be lenient? If sentencing were only about punishment, then we might argue that Ms Neilson has already been punished: she’s lost her best friend and her life will never be the same again. But sentencing is about much more — it is about deterrence. Not just about deterring Ms Neilson from getting behind the wheel of a car when she’s had too much to drink, but also about deterring others. It is about denunciation, about letting everyone know this isn’t acceptable behaviour, that as a community, we won’t put up with drink-driving. It is also about restorative justice. A young woman is dead, and Joanne Neilson, sitting there at the back of this courtroom,’ he paused and turned around to look at Jo, ‘is the one responsible. Until she serves her time, she’s not entitled to be part of the community. Ashleigh’s family, Ashleigh’s friends, are entitled to justice.’

  Sarah made some quick notes in the margins of her closing statement as Robert sat down. Judge Anderson tapped her pen on the table and nodded.

  Sarah had considered launching her statement with a claim for joint responsibility — after all, the other girls, Ashleigh included, had entered the car knowing Jo had been drinking. They let their desire for a ride home taint their judgement and made Jo feel pressured to drive. They could’ve stopped her and didn’t. They should bear some responsibility for the accident. But she remembered Danny Maher, her law professor, an older man who’d spent his whole working life in legal aid: ‘Don’t forget that the family of the victim are in the courtroom.’ She’d spent many hours gathered with other students around the coffee table in his office for feedback on essays, for informal tutorials, and, later, when she was working for him as a research assistant in the third and fourth year of her degree, for ‘case strategy meetings’. He was a serious-looking, heavily bearded man, and the first-year students were terrified of him; she’d often find them, too frightened to knock on his door, loitering in the hallway outside his office. He was loud and brash, especially in court and in lectures, but one on one he was a kind and gentle man. ‘Some lawyers think they have to treat the “other side” like the enemy. Even when that “other side” is the victim’s family. Show compassion. Sometimes you have to say things that hurt the victim’s family, sometimes it’s inevitable, but some lawyers go too far.’

  She thought about Danny now as she turned to look at Ashleigh’s family and past them, to Jo. She had asked him once, ‘How do you make sure you give your client the best chance, fight for them, if you allow yourself to feel sorry for the victims?’ They were in his office. He was sitting in a leather armchair, in front of a large window with a view of the courtyard where students sat to eat their lunch, to read, to make out. The room, with its high bookshelves, had a desk that was larger than the kitchen table in the share house she lived in with six other law students. He smiled at her. ‘Surgeons must be very careful / When they take the knife! / Underneath their fine incisions / Stirs the culprit, — Life!’ He often quoted Dickinson in response to her questions. Sometimes this was frustrating, but after a while she came to look forward to
hearing the poems. ‘Emily Dickinson: you could learn a lot from her,’ he said, as if he were referring the students to a top criminal lawyer or an acclaimed philosophy professor.

  Sarah glanced down at her notes. At the top she’d written, A good story elicits empathy. Her job was to tell a compelling story. This wasn’t a lesson she’d learnt from Dickinson, whose poems were sharp observations, not narratives; from Dickinson she’d learnt the power of words to change a person’s perspective. It was the hours spent watching Danny in court. He was thorough. Meticulous research and planning were part of the preparation for every case. He knew all the facts, understood every relevant law and precedent. Everything he needed, the answer to any question the judge might ask, was within reach. But it only made sense when Danny began to speak. Even when she disliked the client, even when she was convinced they were guilty, Danny made her see them anew, as human. This is a person not so unlike you and me.

  ‘Jo was nineteen years old at the time of the accident, twenty now. She’s young, even though the law considers her an adult. We might say she was old enough to know better. There is no doubt she made a mistake, a bad mistake. She exercised poor judgement. The results were fatal. Ashleigh was a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl. We’ve heard she had a bright future and a family who loved her. This is a tragedy that has impacted the lives of everyone in this courtroom, including Jo.

  ‘My colleague has pointed out already that Jo has been punished, that she’s lost her best friend, that her life will not be the same again. He’s acquiesced that Jo isn’t likely to be a repeat offender. It is also clear that even if the girls were arguing that night, they were friends, they loved each other, and neither of them would wish harm on the other.

  ‘A young woman is dead and Jo Neilson is responsible; the community demands justice. But before venturing into this notion of what justice is and how justice can be restored, if it can be restored, it’s only fair that we learn something about Jo’s life. That before, Your Honour, you sentence her, you have some sense of who she is and how she came to be driving that car on that night.’ Sarah stopped and took a few sips of water. Then she went on to give some background about Jo: Mandy’s pregnancy at seventeen, the separation between Mandy and David, the death of Jo’s grandfather when she was five years old. She talked about their struggles with money, and described their small, run-down house on Hyde Street, with the unbearable noise of the traffic, the diesel fumes, and the petroleum stench from the Mobil Oil terminal across the road.